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Nextbook Premium 8 HD Tablet Review

General Use

For internal storage the Premium 8 HD boasts 8GB, but after everything is said and done, you end up with only 5.6 GB out of the box. Luckily a microSD card is supported if more space is needed.

As you can see from the next two pictures, this Nextbook comes with Jellybean installed, which is more than can be said for many other cheap tablets.

The layout and apps are going to be familiar for anyone who owns an Android device and thankfully Nextbook kept the bloatware to a minimum. The one or two pre-installed apps that you won’t need can be easily uninstalled if they bother you too much.

Despite the poor numbers, brightness and screen clarity weren’t too bad when you are actually using it. The low resolution wasn’t really noticeable unless you were directly comparing it with a high-res tablet. Brightness wasn’t that great either. Indoors you won’t have any issues, but bring it outside and you are going to struggle seeing anything clearly.

Because of the old-school TN panel screen, viewing angle is poor. Moving the screen any amount out of direct line of sight will make a noticeable difference, and anything past about 45 degrees is just unviewable.

Video

Because the screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio when most videos today are 16:9, there are going to be large black borders around everything which really cuts down on actual viewable space. HD Youtube videos play smooth and look fine, despite the low screen resolution.

The HDMI port worked just fine displaying 1080p video to my TV. Thanks to the upgraded hardware, this model doesn’t lag on the tablet itself and is instead smooth on both the device and the TV.

Audio

Speaker quality was pretty terrible as you might imagine from a low cost device. The sound is tinny and weak, barely getting loud enough to be useful. The bottom line is that you probably wouldn’t want to be using the built-in speakers.

Thankfully the sound quality is fantastic through the headphone jack. Plug in a pair of decent earbuds and you will be able to watch you favorite movie in even fairly noisy environments.

Battery Life

Battery life has been improved quite a bit from the previous model, giving me about 5-6 hours on a full charge depending on brightness and how much gaming I do. 5-6 hours still isn’t that great compared to many other tablets, but it is still a usable amount.

Benchmarks

Our benchmark results actually turned out better than I expected, seeing as the last model came in dead last in everything. In the AnTuTu benchmark we scored a 12611 which lands us firmly between the Galaxy S2 and One X.

The Vellamo benchmark has two tests, HTML5 performance, and “Metal” which is heavily CPU dependent. In Metal the Premium 8 HD scored a 424 putting us essentially between a Galaxy S2 and S3. In the HTML5 benchmark it scored 1214 points, putting it just above the S2 but quite a ways behind the S3.

These numbers aren’t too bad and this performance translates over into the real-world as well, giving smooth gameplay and web browsing during all of my testing.